In Exchange Server 2007 and also in Exchange 2010, a UM-enabled user can call in to an internal or external telephone number that's configured on a UM dial plan to access their mailbox and use the menu system found in Outlook Voice Access. Using this menu system, UM-enabled users can read e-mail, listen to voice messages, interact with their Outlook calendar, access their personal contacts, and perform tasks such as configuring their Outlook Voice Access PIN or recording their voice mail greetings.

There are two Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging user interfaces available to subscribers: the telephone user interface (TUI) and the voice user interface (VUI). These two interfaces together are called Outlook Voice Access. For a list of all the commands that are available in Outlook Voice Access, see Outlook Voice Access Command Reference.

You can prevent users from receiving voice mail, but let them retain the ability to access their Exchange 2010 mailbox using Outlook Voice Access. You can enable users for Unified Messaging and configure the users' mailbox with an extension number that isn't currently being used by another user in the organization.

Important:

For the VUI or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to be used for subscriber access, it must be enabled on the UM dial plan to enable the VUI functionality as described in the scenarios in the following section.

The following scenarios demonstrate how Outlook Voice Access can be used for subscriber access from a telephone:

Access e-mail An Outlook Voice Access user places a call to the subscriber access number from a telephone and wants to access their e-mail. The voice prompt says, "Welcome. You're connected to Microsoft Exchange. To access your mailbox, please enter your extension. To contact someone, press the # key." After the user enters a mailbox extension number, the voice prompt says, "Please enter your PIN and press the # key." After the user enters a PIN, the voice prompt says, "You have 2 new voice mails, 10 new e-mail messages, and your next meeting is at 10:00 A.M. Please say voice mail, e-mail, calendar, personal contacts, directory, or personal options." When the user says "E-mail," Unified Messaging reads the message header and then the name, subject, time, and priority for the messages that are in the subscriber's mailbox.

Access calendar An Outlook Voice Access user places a call to the subscriber access number from a telephone and wants to access their calendar. The voice prompt says, "Welcome. You're connected to Microsoft Exchange. To access your mailbox, please enter your extension. To contact someone, press the # key." After the user enters a mailbox extension, the voice prompt says, "Please enter your PIN and press the # key." After the user enters a PIN, the voice prompt says, "You have 2 new voice mails, 10 new e-mail messages, and your next meeting is at 10:00 A.M. Please say voice mail, e-mail, calendar, personal contacts, directory, or personal options." When the user says "Calendar," Unified Messaging says, "Sure, and which day should I open?" The user says, "Today's calendar." Unified Messaging responds by saying, "Opening today's calendar." Unified Messaging reads each calendar appointment for that day for the user.

Note:

If a Unified Messaging server encounters a corrupted calendar item in a user's mailbox, it will fail to read the item, but will return the caller to the Outlook Voice Access main menu and will skip reading any additional meetings that may be scheduled for the rest of the day.

Access voice mail An Outlook Voice Access user places a call to the subscriber access number from a telephone and wants to access voice mail. The voice prompt says, "Welcome. You're connected to Microsoft Exchange. To access your mailbox, please enter your extension. To contact someone, press the # key." After the user enters a mailbox extension number, the voice prompt says, "Please enter your PIN and press the # key." After the user enters a PIN, the voice prompt says, "You have 2 new voice mails, 10 new e-mail messages, and your next meeting is at 10:00 A.M. Please say voice mail, e-mail, calendar, personal contacts, directory, or personal options." The user says "Voice mail" and Unified Messaging reads the message header and then the name, subject, time, and priority for the voice messages that are in the user's mailbox.

Note:

If speech recognition is enabled, users can access their UM-enabled mailbox using speech input. However, subscribers can also use touchtone, also known as dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF), by pressing 0. Speech recognition isn't enabled for PIN input.

Locate an e-mail alias An Outlook Voice Access user places a call to the subscriber access number from a telephone and wants to locate a person in the directory by spelling their e-mail alias. The voice prompt says, "Welcome. You're connected to Microsoft Exchange. To contact someone, press the # key." The user presses the # key, and then spells the name of the person using touchtone inputs.

Note:

The directory search feature with subscriber access isn't speech-enabled. Users will be able to spell the name of the person who they want to contact only by using touchtone inputs.

Important:

In some companies (especially in East Asia), office telephones may not have letters on the keys of the telephone. This makes the spell-the-name feature that uses the touchtone interface almost impossible to use without a working knowledge of the key mappings. By default, Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging uses the E.161 key mapping. For example, 2=ABC, 3=DEF, 4=GHI, 5=JKL, 6=MNO, 7=PQRS, 8=TUV, 9=WXYZ.

When inputting a combination of letters and numbers, for example, Mike1092, the numeric digits are mapped to themselves. For an e-mail alias of Mike1092 to be entered correctly, the user must press the numbers 64531092. Also, for characters other than A-Z and 0-9, there won't be a telephone key equivalent. Therefore, these characters shouldn't be entered. For example, the e-mail alias mike.wilson would be entered as 6453945766. Even though there are 11 characters to be input, only 10 digits are entered by the user because there's no digit equivalent for the period (.). For details, seeOutlook Voice Access User Scenarios.